Nothing rankles the ire of any marketer with even a tad of experience more than those highly touted “new” tech terms or concepts positioned as silver bullet answers to, heretofore unsolved, marketing problems. And to those of us who’ve been around the marketing block a few times, these new terms resemble a toddler’s early attempts at speech – cute but a phase they’ll grow out of.

Unfortunately, though, some of these usually harmless little word experiments “stick;” taking on a larger-than-life meaning that does a disservice to everyone. My plain hope here is to put these concepts into context so they can be practically applied in the day-in-day-out business of marketing.

1. White labeling:

The history: It started life decades ago in the tech world referring to the practice of re-branding 3rd party technology as your own so it can be resold at a higher price. This was worked well for many tech platforms like CRM or email service providers because the “resellers” were often system integrators or tech companies themselves.

The impact: When the practice began to be applied to the marketing industry, i.e. an agency white labeling a tech platform, it translated poorly because a marketing company is poorly skilled to take on the management of a tech platform.

Why I hate the term: The term shines a spotlight on the bigger disconnect between the business models of tech platforms versus advertisers/ agencies. White labeling is no solution for anyone; agencies have to fake it, tech companies get no credit for their innovation and brands are sold “black boxes” – a sure recipe for problems down the road.

2. Native ads:

The history: This term was recently coined by Fred Wilson in 2011 as “native internet marketing model” and “native monetization systems” (Fred Wilson’s 2011 talk on this topic). This concept was picked up by a social media tech platform and morphed into meaning advertising that’s consistent (a.k.a. native) with the environment around it.

The impact: If only Fred had asked any marketer, he’d have learned we had a term for that concept; alternatively called advertorials (1980s), sponsored content (1990s) or custom content (2000s). And just like in years past, the trust issue about separation of “content church” and “advertising state” plagues the effectiveness of today’s “native ads.”

Why I hate the term: Tech platforms can push demographically accurate “native advertising” but that doesn’t make it trusted advertising, (disclosures notwithstanding). Experienced marketers know that advertising that is not trusted is not worth doing. Tech ventures are climbing that steep learning curve.

3. Growth hacker:

The history: Somehow this term evolved as an awkward mash-up of the terms “hacking,” the ability to use tech wits to achieve results usually at “low/ no cost,” and “marketing growth.”

Ugh! This pairing spawned a Frankenstein child capable only of crude brute tech force that is ultimately unfit for the delicate business of marketing.

The impact: I don’t think anyone has a real clue what a growth hacker really is. I do know that anyone who is actually hiring marketing folks snickers at the phrase.

Why I hate the term: Some things seem obvious and yet require saying nonetheless. For the record, no marketer wakes one day to say; “Let me spend the most money possible to create the least result possible.” Marketing is about getting the most bang for the least buck. That’s not “growth hacking” – that’s the marketer’s job description.

4. MVP (Minimum Viable Product):

The history: The “when to ship” decision remains probably one of the most excruciating decisions every tech CEO must make. Investors, eager to reduce their risk, push CEOs to ship the least offensive product possible a.k.a. the MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

And they’re not kidding when describing it as “minimum viable.” This virtually guarantees that almost immediately, iterations are needed to adapt to market feedback. Problem is, in this context, MVP and the “iteration” model (deserving a place on this list in its own right) fails marketing practitioners.

The impact: The MVP problem lies in the fact that a constantly “iterating” marketing platform can mess up the very delicate and time consuming sales conversion process with just a single interruptive interstitial here or badly retargeting ad there.

Why I hate the term: MVP encourages a UE race to the bottom with more and more users getting more and more frustrated. Worse, it seems the MVP concept has become a “get out of jail free” card to excuse a tech platform’s particularly bad results or awkward UE. “Iterations” offer little salvation, actually exacerbating the problem (more on that below).

5. Iteration:

The history: Software development is a process of creating, testing, fixing, testing, fixing a.k.a. iterations. This “agile” process has evolved over the years but it is always based on some machine-based process of trial and error.

The impact: While machines are great at handling iteration – people aren’t. Making continual changes or iterations to a marketing platform is fraught with possible bad user experiences that can blow any marketing proforma out of the water.

Why I hate the term: Iterations have become so pervasive in an MVP world, it is virtually impossible for marketers to keep up. Facebook alone is planning an “iteration” of six ad products in the next few weeks. Iteration is chaos for marketers.

6. Earned media

The history: This term does not have its origins in tech but in PR where it referred to the additional “earned” or free media a story got. This additional “free” media coverage was in direct contrast to “paid” media coverage.

But sometime in the last 5 years, the term was co-opted by the tech world and linked to social media with unintended but harmful consequences.

The impact: The damage was done in talking about “social media” as being able to generate “earned media” – setting up the dangerous expectation that social media is free or cheap just like “earned media.”

Why I hate the term: Any marketing practitioner knows it takes lots of time and hard work to get social media to work properly. That is not free or even cheap. The mythical “earned media” beast creates false expectations that are hard to overcome.

7. Impressions:

The history: In the old days, it was relatively easy to estimate the number of people an ad campaign would reach given the limited number of outlets; TV, magazine, radio and even movies. This diverse yet limited media was measured in terms of standard “impressions” easily translatable to a real-world audience number.

The impact: Theuse of impressions worked with traditional media because of its tangible audience delivery numbers but it fails in today’s digital landscape that is capable of serving billions of impressions but incapable of telling us how many people were actually reached.

Why I hate the term: This term, more than any, IMHO is the root cause of a system-wide loss of trust between agencies and tech platforms; advertisers and publisher audience numbers; consumers and advertisers. This epic trust failure explains the steep decline in all forms of digital advertising interactions.

8. Engagement:

The history: The term was long used to describe great creative because it was “engaging.” Later, sometime in the 1990’s, it was applied more specifically to direct marketing because of its ability to precisely measure direct response engagement (i.e. – email or banner ads).

The impact: It’s rather humorous to watch marketing tech platforms gush about engagement as though it just hatched from the brain of the clever tech set. That would be benign enough except that a tech platform’s idea of engagement is a herky jerky set of user “twitches” and clicks instead of the elegant dance that a great engagement experience can become.

Why I hate the term: Technologists’ slavish devotion to engagement is rather shallow; lacking in the nuance to understand the profound ROI difference between just an “interaction” and true “engagement.”

The marketing tech industry is trying to respond to the continued stream of bad news of plummeting digital ad response rates. At its heart, I believe the challenges stem from the lack of connectedness between technologists’ capabilities and marketers’ requirements. Language can be a bridge connecting technology with the business of marketing. Only then can we begin to unleash all the potential.

“Judy,” a sweet tech project manager said to me recently after I discussed some of the gaps in the social marketing ecosystem “You are on a crusade.”

I didn’t see that one coming so it stopped me dead in my tracks. What crusade was that I wondered? I probed but she dodged answering me. The word crusade is laden with meaning so it stuck with me – what had I said to give her that impression?

In hindsight it seems obvious but in the moment, I was oblivious to the shift in my thinking from simply being a Surprised Entrepreneur (as I posted here) to becoming a Rebel Entrepreneur.

My cause was simple – to put the human element back into the business of marketing that has been platform’d to a near digital death. I am driven to re-infuse marketing with the sense of wonder, joy and creativity that I had the good fortune to revel in during my earlier career days.

In those ancient days (one generation after Mad Men but before the Internet revolution had really hit) we could put hearts into our work because there were few tools or platforms or technologies to guide the work. It was pure creativity and smarts. It was hard to measure the effectiveness of the much of the work but you knew your work made a difference when the company did better – jobs were created and bonuses were happily doled out.

Over the years, technology improved how we deployed marketing but we continued to be driven by our nobler motivations to create great marketing that improved people’s lives. We knew we could make a difference.

But there’s been a shift in the industry over the past 3 years. Marketing, especially social marketing has become a tech-heavy exercise of manipulating retargeting platforms, or reward systems or algorithmically based big data platforms. Social marketing is reduced to a conversation about content syndication or sentiment analysis.

So it’s no surprise that over that period of time, inextricably, I have seen tech and platforms taking the joy and the nobility out of the system. I have become overwhelmed by the supremacy of marketing platforms over serving people and algorithms over inspiration.

My sense of alarm was quite publicly aired in the digital pages of Ad Age and Huffington Post. I ranted at Facebook when I felt defeated at using Facebook productively. I admitted frustration at the black-box techno-jargon wave that swept over us marketers drowning us in confusion. I’ve even had the chutzpah to question the funding strategies of VCs who are basing their investments on marketing principles that simply don’t apply anymore. But mostly I challenged the 20 something CEOs who created marketing platforms that are long on cool but short on practical application for real marketers.

In the process, I have been:

Flamed by Macboys and called a hack (look up “Judy Shapiro” and “mac security”)

Accused of being techno-phobic and capable of only kitchen related work, ideally pregnant at the same time thus preventing me from ever writing offending articles ever again

Tarred and feathered as an “old line” marketer unable to keep up with the iteration savvy tech guys

Harangued for questioning if the “Content as king” model was sustainable

And very nearly digitally lynched when I first suggested in 2010 that perhaps Facebook had jumped the shark.

And so against all odds – here I am, founder and CEO of a social tech company, readying the BETA launch of our new network called Eden for Q1.

Against all odds, this little venture that started a year ago will be introducing a different type of social marketing framework that is a based on an “opt-in” paradigm. We are going up against the big “push based” social marketing platforms and networks. It is an uphill but noble fight. In our vision, Eden is a place where users control the action – how they see content or which brands they interact with. It is a reversal of the; “It is our platform so you have to play by our ever-changing rules” social network that dominates social marketing today.

Against all odds, we managed to secure funding including from an early stage VC for which we are eternally grateful. We’ve created relationships with agencies ready to sell Eden to their clients and we’ve sealed meaningful partnerships that help us gain access to the highest levels within publishing and brands.

Against all odds, as one woman in her 50’s, I am privileged to be joined by a community of seasoned marketers to help in this crusade. Our collective goal is to right the marketing ship listing dangerously to one side from the weight of platforms and big data. I can’t express my gratitude to this brave league of fellow crusaders other than to give them full credit for their invaluable role in our noble adventure. I give them a place of honor in our company’s history:

Griffin Stenger, a founding partner of Concept Farm, a leading social marketing agency [Crain’s]. www.conceptfarm.com

Robyn Streisand, Founder and CEO of The Mixx Group – a branding agency and an early investor in engageSimply. www.themixxnyc.com.

David Hoffman whose career spans four decades as a film producer and corporate strategic communicator. Wikipedia’s simply calls David: “One of America’s veteran documentary filmmakers.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hoffman;

John Bowman, was Exec VP Strategy at Saatchi working on their premier brands and is now authoring a book about his great Grandfather, Archibald Stark Van Orden http://theassassinsassassin.com/about/

George Collins, a long time database expert and CEO of Research & Response – a database management consultancy. http://www.rresp.com/

Mark Bonchek, Founder of Orbit + Co whose strategic consultancy is “creating a new direction in business by shifting the relationship of individuals and institutions from PUSH to PULL.” http://www.thinkorbit.com/

Against the odds, I have been able to attract a seasoned management team of marketing practitioners who had to “build it” after the consultants talked about loving it but conveniently left when the real work began. They were the ones who built those first generation eCommerce sites and created the principles that good UE designers use today. Our journalists understand SEO and our artists are offering their images for free all in an effort to be a part in the creation of an alternate social marketing reality – a fresh start called Eden.

So against all odds, I find I have become a Rebel Entrepreneur – so strange especially given my training, temperament and age. The potential high rewards of being a rebel all too often comes at a high price and we’ve seen our share of deals gone bad, betrayal by trusted colleagues and funding plans gone awry (Sandy was devastating to the startup community).

And yet, despite the odds, we are close to the launch of our network.

So I invite you all over to Bit Rebel to experience this journey with us as we sprint to Eden’s launch in Q1. Celebrate our highs and feel the unnatural lows that are endemic to startups. Share our anxiety as our burn rate increases but our funding outlook seems further out (we are doing a second round of seed funding now). Take a peek behind the startup curtain, see what’s really going on and help shape what happens. The success of Eden will be a triumph of us marketing practitioners like web designers, SEO geeks and developers over algorithmic feats of IP muscle.

Our mission is noble and our cause true. Come join us.

I guess like any good crusade, we need a flag and a manifesto. Stay tuned – I am just learning how to be a rebel. Kinda of exhilarating actually. But

The life of an entrepreneur is an emotionally volatile one. The ups and downs are extreme because often so much is at risk.

As a newbie entrepreneur, I was especially battered recently by the wild swings of bad news and good news so as to make me ill with startup sea sickness. Yet, as I began to get my sea legs; slowly the nausea was replaced with a serene inevitability that this little venture might, against all odds, make it.

It’s not arrogance that colors my thinking. Nor is it an irrational faith in my brilliant thinking.

But it is the realization that if I make it will be because of the community around me. The vision for Eden was to create a way for consumer’s to create a trusted web space starting with Eden Network – a social network of topic based communities that serve high search but badly served topics (e.g. karaoke).

The sheer audacity of my attempting a tech startup, in retrospective, was stunning. As a marketer, the notion of being a tech CEO was about as likely as me going bungee jumping any time soon. Sure – perhaps the opportunity may come up but it’s unlikely I would ACTUALLY do it.

Yet this venture was born of pure passion – actually passionate frustration at how there so much brilliant marketing tech innovation going on and a total lack of operational practicality in being able to use much of it.

But while frustration goes a long way towards driving me forward – it doesn’t make me a seasoned entrepreneur. I’ve made many rookie mistakes but I am encouraged to continue mainly because of the support of the community around me.

And because of the encouragement of my community, despite all the pitfalls and pratfalls, within the last week, I sense a fundamental shift.

I turned a corner.

Different key pieces are coming together in a way I could have never expected; brands are excited to participate in Eden Network; agencies are anxious to offer new social marketing options that’s easy for them to buy and monetize. Key management holes are being filled with ease and partners are approaching me with increasing volume making me dizzy with potential.

My community of friends and colleagues are the foundation upon which this venture rests. It is an honor to have such loyal and supportive friends. It is also humbling and inspiring to be sure I don’t let them down. Just a few weeks ago, I felt like I was in a free fall dive and now I am buoyed by a sense of “knowing” that we have a shot at making it.

The Jewish New Year is about to commence and for thoughtful souls, it is a time of acknowledgement and gratitude to all that we have been given.

In that spirit, it’s up to me to be sure that the community knows the depth of my gratitude. May we be privileged to share a year of peace and awareness at how precious each one of us is within the community of humanity.

The last few days were eventful for Facebook and its ever so precocious young founder.

First, Facebook went public to much fanfare. Here is how the Mercury News summed it all up:

“After opening at a price of $42.05, shares of Facebook’s wildly anticipated initial public offering closed a mere 23 cents above its pre-set price of $38. The failure of Facebook’s shares to rise well past $38 was seen as a disappointment by some observers. Nonetheless, it remained the most successful technology IPO in history and set a record for the number of shares sold — more than 567 million — in a company’s stock market debut.”

Then before we could absorb that news we learn, in stark contrast to the hullabaloo of the IPO, our young CEO-HERO gets married before a humble gathering of 100 people ostensibly there to celebrate the bride’s graduation.

With two such momentous events surrounding our CEO-HERO, we saw endless stories about Mark Zuckerberg as the driving force of Facebook. Even more stories were written about whether Facebook was a good investment for individuals.

But what interested me more was really understanding what was Facebook’s secret sauce that made it worth a $100 B (“B” stands for breathless also – ya’ know). Why did this stock seem to defy all rational evaluation?

Many ascribed that stellar growth to the brilliance of Mark. Yet, it just did not feel right to me to assign Facebook’s unprecedented growth to his vision or drive alone. I give the kid credit – but giving him so much credit just left me unsatisfied.

And because everyone ascribed Facebook’s stellar growth to some alchemy borne of CEO-HERO brilliance, people are willing to suspend critical thought to its value and its future.

For me, the Facebook mystery deepened. At a most fundamental level, why was Facebook worth so much?

The answer came to me in a blinding flash from a recent Harvard Business Review article (“Your brain on Facebook” ) that describes the neuroscience behind Facebook’s meteoric rise. In fact, “a decade’s worth of work reveals some unexpected quirks of the brain that all link to one big idea” – we are social creatures with a “social brain” and that drives a lot of behavior in a lot of unexpected ways.

“Here’s how the social brain works. There is a “default” brain network that is always “on” and it is involved in thinking about yourself and other people. When not doing anything else, the brain’s favorite pastime is to think about people. We actually have to suppress the activity in this region when we want to do any active processing, such as doing math.” But in the absence of any other cognitive activity – our social brain kicks in!

This explains why Facebook can capture so much of our attention because, neurologically speaking, we are wired to be addicted to being social and “connecting” and “liking”. And like any other addiction, the reward centers in our brain seek ever more satisfaction just to stay “normal.” If you spend a lot of time on Facebook, you are basically “high” all the time. That makes it really hard to focus, think deeply, or perhaps learn something new.

Now that gives a new spin to the term The Facebook Effect because we are, in effect, wired to become Facebook junkies.

That explains, for example, the irrational exuberance the market places in Facebook’s future. It also puts a new spin on Mark Zuckerberg’s success. No doubt he is clever but maybe his real luck was that he became the first efficient digital distributor of social addiction.

Gives one pause – doesn’t it? As well it should and you would not be alone. More and more “resisters”, people to who shun Facebook, are coming forward as an emerging trend. More and more, people are getting ready to kick the Facebook habit:

What’s next for Facebook as it starts business Monday morning as a public company? I have no idea but while many of us may be hooked on Facebook now – it only takes one disruptor to knock the addiction from our system.

I am surprised how fast shares go in a startup company that people are excited about. Our plan is mostly done and the investors have begun to make overtures. My total ownership has been happily whittled away to include the wonderful talent this company will need.

I gratefully allocated shares to our president who is deeply experienced as both an entrepreneur and a VC. I was deeply honored when our CTO, who gets hundreds of business ideas in a year but only considers “one or two,” signed up.

Ever so carefully, I identified the key talent we would need and one by one each person on this amazing team is coming onboard with their allocation. Yet until we officially close our first round (scheduled for February), I’ve still got ability to allocate shares pretty much as I want.

But not for long.

Now, much to my surprise, I realized how very quickly my ability to make unequivocal awards of shares will be gone. Now is the last moment I have to express my gratitude to people who have believed in my ability to create a new way forward in marketing.

So with the urgency imposed on me by our first formal funding round, I have barely a few weeks to share these gratitude grants.

I get to tell my dear gentle creative storyteller, a giant in the business of video, how valuable his lesson was in the meaning of video to create a powerful experience.

I finally get to ‘give-back’ to my “hard core” (hehe) entrepreneur, investor and civil liberties activist friend. She taught me perhaps one of the most important lessons in this space – the focus needs to be about creating shared experiences using content rather than solely focusing on the content. It is a powerful mind-bending insight that has deeply shaped how engageSimply develops its concept.

I can go back and reconnect with some of my ex-colleagues and CEOs who, over the years, inspired me, instructed me when I just didn’t get it and generally invested in me by teaching me ever so patiently. I can’t imagine how I would be doing this without their support and faith.

In the end, each gratitude grant is my way to repay the gift of confidence that each person so unselfishly gave me. It helped me turn a blind eye to the limitations imposed by stereotypes about what a tech CEO looks like (age or gender) or should do.

Over the next few weeks, I will have the distinct privilege and (one time only) opportunity to award these gratitude grants – without justification or encumbrance. To those of you on the list – stay tuned.

Lots of people track “firsts” (e.g. first investor, first alpha) – I want to note the “lasts.” I want to acknowledge these last few precious moments when I have full control of my company and I can still allocate equity as I want. This privilege is fleeting likely not to be ever repeated.

Like this:

These posts about my journey with this new venture are often characterized as a surprise. In fact, it’s a surprise on so many levels that the unlikeliness of this enterprise is, in itself, a pretty big surprise.

So in this sea of surprises – the biggest surprise rests in the unlikeliness of me as the one to coalesce this vision; only useful to ponder so that we know what makes us different from many other marketing tech companies out there today.

Clearly I am an outlier given my age, gender, training and temperament causing even the casual observer to wonder: “Why me?”

On the surface, one could point to my diversity of experience spanning B2B and B2C marketing. I’ve been fortunate to have worked in a diversity of industries spanning advertising (NWAyer), technology (Bell Labs, CloudLinux), software (CA, Comodo) and telecommunications (AT&T, Lucent, and Paltalk). The combination means I have a quirky understanding of how to look at a marketing situation from the brand point of view as well as the end-user perspective at the same time.

O.K. – That begins to answer the question but doesn’t wholly get at it since many of my colleagues are tech savvy too. While they express curiosity about the new marketing technology, they aren’t going off and creating new businesses. Instead, most of my friends leading marketing agencies or marketing departments (like I was) are banging their heads against the marketing brick wall trying to figure out how to incorporate the “new” technologies into the “old” system profitably. In the chaos of “creative destruction” (a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter), my peers can’t see the marketing forest for the financial trees.

So again I ask; Why me?

In digging deeper, I then realize that my experience with communications networks gave me a unique understanding about social networks. Both types of networks serve a similar purpose – the efficient transport of a call or a marketing message from the network edge (the initiation point) through the switching stations along its way to its ultimate destination.

Side by Side Comparison: Telecom vs Social Media Network

It also became clear to me that as social networks evolved into a powerful marketing network – it urgently needed system architects. But I saw no hint of any serious understanding of the issue or how to address it – not at the agencies or the social network companies or even the armies of consultants who offer insights but few tactical road maps.

When at first I noted this architecture gap back in 2010, I wondered out loud in Ad Age about the impracticality of integrating new technologies into existing marketing systems in posts like “Five Trends That Marked TechCrunch Disrupt Conference 2010.” Then, my wonderment continued unabated at the lack of system attention when I wrote: “Has Facebook jumped the Shark”. Actually, I was writing mostly in the hopes of uncovering the technology companies that were focused on solving this system gap. I knew someone had to it…

But all I heard was deafening silence. I seemed rather alone in recognizing the utter futility of trying to retro-fit the older marketing system with the newer technologies. The sheer tonnage of all these new marketing “platforms;” so defined because they incorporated some combination of the mighty local, social, mobile triad; were built by technologists (usually under 30) and not marketers. This meant they were long on cool but pathetically short on practicality. Yet as slim as many of these businesses seemed, they were getting valuations disproportionate to their real world usefulness (think Groupon), further highlighting the underlying weakening of the business of marketing. It was an ominous echo from a decade ago.

This explains “Why me.” It takes depth of experience to see beyond the buzz to the potent marketing model evolving. I wanted a role in that evolution largely because it seemed few of us with any real world marketing experience were doing the heavy lifting of operationalizing the brilliance of all this new technology.

The journey to understand “Why me” is useful in that it defines the business we are in – creating the system upon which the rich marketing innovation engine can flourish. It’s a surprise that it is me – but perhaps, this is the sweetest surprise of all.